Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/182

156 156 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI to be ? Shall it bo an athletic austerity, fastidious, fiercely fit, finely disdainful of the slack slaveries physical passion entails, tolerating perforce, but con- temptuously, as we have to tolerate all the other absurd ignominies and crudities of the flesh, the clumsy processes of physical reproduction ? Or is there per- haps something finer even than this ? — a new honesty between the sexes, a new comradeship and truce, a mutual admission of duplicities and dangers — an alliance as frank as friendship, both sides pooling their weapons, their wiles, their desires, and using them companionably to win a shared ideal, so that the strongest force in our world and our world's will towards efficiency become at length for the first time identified. A new Puritanism, or co-partnership ? — that seems the choice ; and, to enable us to make it, we need all the information we can find. "I do so hate that farmyard world of sex," says Philip Madras moodily, " men and women always treating each other in this unfriendly way. . . . Hasn't Humanity come of age at last ? Finery sits so well on children. And they strut and make love so absurdly. . . . But I don't see why we men and women should not find all happiness, and beauty too, in soberer purposes. . . ." He voices a discontent, a secret self-contempt, that nips us all, uncomfortably conscious of discrepancies. And, voicing it, he makes the choice much easier : he enables us to see so much more clearly that we crave. For these wordless problems of relationship are supremely the questions which the dramatist (novelist or playwright) is specially appointed to illumine and explore. Problem plays? There are no others half so proper ; all others deal with questions that might be better considered and discussed in text-book prose. But the artist is the scientist of sex ; he is the only psychologist worth listening to. Actual experiments are so cvimbrous, so confused, the results of experience